I would like to apply to join the moderation team for the Communities > Africa category.
I have been an active contributor on both OSM and this forum. As you can see from my profile stats, I visit the forum very frequently (360+ days visited) and have read over 12k posts. I am from Morocco and I am fully committed to the OSM community in Africa.
Currently, it appears that 2 of the 4 listed moderators in @mods-africa have been inactive for 3 and a half years.
I would be more than happy to replace the inactive moderators and assist the current active team in keeping the forum active and organized.
More precisely, I want to focus on two main improvements:
I plan to go through all the past and future topics, and organize them by consistently using country-specific tags (e.g., algeria, kenya) or topic-based tags (e.g. tagging, events). This will make it easier for users to find topics relevant to their specific country or interest.
I also want to give a second life to this forum by encouraging people from all African countries, especially my peers from the Moroccan community, to make it their main place to engage in discussions, in whichever language they speak, not only English.
Finally, I plan to give a bigger voice to the community by implementing yearly moderator health checks. This is specified in the guidelines and done in other communities, but has unfortunately not been implemented here yet. I see this as a great occasion to get feedback on potential improvements. I also commit to ensuring that all messages receive a fast response.
As a member of @forums-governance, I’d like to gauge community support for the application with a voting poll and invite the community of the Communities > Africa category to participate:
Do you approve @ilias to become a category moderator for the Africa category?
Yes I approve
No, I don’t approve (please comment below)
0voters
The poll will run for 5 days. The application will be accepted if it gets at least 80% of yes votes. Note that votes (who voted what) are public to help identify any abuses.
That would be ideal, but we need to be realistic also, some communities cannot be compared to the european ones, many mappers in Africa are not even africans themselves. I was in touch with @ilias for a while, and I can confirm he’s becoming an important, Africa-based figure in the mapping community.
Thank you for all your efforts in Africa. I wanted to share a quick insight that might be useful… the OSM Africa community is very active on WhatsApp, with one main OSM Africa group, as well as groups by country/community. Discussions there are quite dynamic. However, the engagement on the forum and even on the Telegram channel is still limited, which could be a great opportunity for a moderator to help connect these spaces and encourage more interaction on the forum.
Hi @Hajar-El, thank you so much for your insight. Indeed, the forum has been a bit overlooked recently in favor of instant messaging. Bridging the gap between these spaces is definitely something I would love to take on
